


Sorry About The Blood In Your Mouth

by wouldiwereShOoOkspeare



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Ben used to kill people, F/M, He is trying, Morally Ambiguous Character, Slow Burn, Smut, Suicidal Ideation, but we have to work for it, he was not a nice guy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-23
Updated: 2020-06-23
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:00:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24878092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wouldiwereShOoOkspeare/pseuds/wouldiwereShOoOkspeare
Summary: Ben worked as a hitman and since killing Snoke, he doesn't know what to do with himself. He’s tired of killing but he doesn’t know if he’s good at anything else and he just so desperately wants to be good at something.Rey isn’t that keen on the idea of having to live the rest of her life.A fic about self-sabotage and our two babies getting better.If you’re looking for a fic that isn’t problematic, this ain’t it. Sorry.SLOW UPDATES/BORDERLINE HIATUS UNTIL UNI LETS ME BREATHE
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 1
Kudos: 19





	Sorry About The Blood In Your Mouth

**Author's Note:**

> content warning:  
> Ben thinks about/tries to kill Rey.  
> Mentions of child grooming (kinda, I'm just covering bases).  
> Suicidal ideation (again, kinda but it will pop up again in future)
> 
> I just want to say please don't take this fic as a lesson on morality. I'm very aware that there's a lot of things ethically and morally wrong with the premise of this fic. It's fiction, please take it with a grain of salt.

There she is. 

It’s two in the morning and on the park bench lies a small shadow of a woman, her body illuminated by the ugly yellow light of the streetlamp. Her face is silhouetted in shadow and the light of the streetlamp reflects on her greasy brown hair that is haphazardly pulled back in a curious style that consists of three buns. Ben pays more attention to the meticulously particular style that is pulled back so casually than is strictly necessary, but he’s always had a thing for hair.  
She is slight, boney and drowning in a ratty torn sweater that engulfs her body in a way that not even high fashion could consider flattering. 

If Bazine was next to him she would tell him that her wearing that sweater is reason enough for him to kill her. ‘It’s a crime of fashion,’ she’d scoff while raking her perfectly manicured black nails through her freshly blown-out hair, tight linen dress perfectly pressed and tailored to fit every angle and curve of her body that he’d become so familiar with. 

But Bazine is not next to him (thank _fuck_ ) and he isn’t going to kill the slight thing for committing fashion-related treason. 

The girl stretches slightly, her neck craning out from the ripped neck of her sweater, pale and slender practically begging for his fingers to bruise them. 

He just wishes that he wasn’t going to bruise her in the murderous context. 

If only it were begging for him to bruise her in the non-murderous context, he muses. It’s a shame that he’s going to kill her. 

She’s very pretty. 

While Ben knows not to value a woman by their beauty, that they’re so much more than an aesthetic object and something eerily like mothers voice berates him in the back of his head for thinking it, it doesn’t stop Ben from thinking that it’s a shame. 

That it’s a shame she’s going to have to die. 

The girl lets out a heavy sigh, her breath escaping past her parted lips curling into a whisper of condensation in the cold dark of the night. 

She’s alone. In a park. At two in the morning. Ben’s pretty sure that there’s a graveyard nearby.

As the girl stares blankly up at the light-polluted night sky he can’t help but think that it’s such a strange way to spend one’s time. Though to be fair, it’s not like he has any hobbies to boast of in particular. 

Deciding to get it over and done with and just _kill_ that boredom he slowly, but surely stalks over to her. 

She can’t see him yet, but the slight stiffening of her body tells him that she can hear him. Ben has always been good at his job but he never really managed to master ‘stealth’ and add it to his skillset.

When he’s about five metres away from her she perks up leaning back on her elbows and fixes him with a curious gaze. 

“You planning to kill me?” she throws at him, tone casual. 

Well. That’s not what he expected. Delightfully off-script. And she’s British. Interesting. 

He may have to improvise. He’s not very good at improvising. 

“Jesus- what the fu-” he stammers. “God, no.”

_Lie_. 

“Then what are you acting so sly for?” 

He says nothing in response, cocking his head to the side and assessing her. Her frank, no bullshit attitude is amusing yet alarming and with every blink of her eyes, he can’t help but think just how much of a fucking shame it is. 

“You have a gun?”

“No.” Ben doesn’t like guns. Too messy. Too loud. And as Snoke always said, Ben was big for a reason, he may as well use it to his advantage. 

“Shame.” 

Okay. Definitely off-script. Did he-

Is he missing something? 

“Sorry?” his voice is so unsure and confused that he thinks it’s the most truthful his voice has ever sounded. 

“It’s okay,” the girl commiserates leaning forward to rest her elbows on her knees, peering at him with squinted eyes. 

“You do have big hands though. That could work too, I suppose,” she muses. 

Ben is confused. Very fucking confused. This isn’t usually what happens. 

“Do you want me to give you some advice?” the girl offers.

Ben blinks. That’s new. 

“I’m Ben.” 

“Okay Ben,” she chuckles. “I’m Rey. Now I think that the best way to probably start with this-” 

“What are you doing?”

“I’m giving you advice Ben,” she explains calmly, her hand hovering in the air mid-gesticulation.

That’s cute of her but-

“Why?” Ben is very aware of the fact that he sounds stupid but this girl- Rey- she is…

Well, he thinks his reaction is founded. 

“You’re trying to kill me, yes?”

_Yes_. 

“No.” 

“Then why did you start stalking towards me at two in the morning.” 

“Why are you out here at two in the morning?” he shoots back, slightly disgruntled. 

Rey continues to stare at him, her gaze piercing and almost admonishing. He feels twelve all over again, with Principal Holdo staring him down until he cracks (which never took long, from a young age Ben was always on the cusp of some form of an emotional extreme). 

“Okay so maybe I was trying to kill you,” he mutters, lips turning up when he registers her hushed victorious cry of “I knew it”. 

He sheepishly rubs the back of his neck determinedly avoiding her gaze, inspecting the speck of dirt on his shoes instead. 

“Sorry.” The word weighs heavily on his tongue and he’s been saying it so much for the past few weeks that it’s almost always stuck in the middle of his throat, waiting to leap out. Usually, the recipient of his apologies isn’t alive to hear it though. 

She pats down the bench next to her, budging over to make space for him and without his brain comprehending what is happening his legs move and suddenly his arse is firmly planted on the hard bench that is warm from where she was sitting. 

“Why were you going to kill me?” 

Ben doesn’t really have a good answer for that though he isn’t sure what would constitute a good answer for such a question.

He shrugs. 

“Bored.”

He sees her glance at him curiously from the corner of his eye. 

“You can’t just kill people because you’re bored you know.” 

He shrugs again. 

“I know.” 

She quirks an eye at him, half playful, half judgemental. Ben’s always been terrified of judgement but there’s something about being under her scrutiny that feels so… _good_. He can’t get enough of it. 

“I kill people. That’s what I do. Or used to do. And still do. Occasionally.” Ben is painfully aware that what he’s saying is insane and he’s not making it sound any saner. “Anyway, it’s what I’m good at. And I’m trying to stop because you’re right, I can’t just keep on killing people. So yes, I was going to kill you but I just wanted to be good at something.” 

A heavy silence falls between them that is accompanied by the sound of Rey shifting her sneakers in the dirt creating hypnotic dusty patterns. 

She breaks the silence with the melodic lilt of her British accent-

“I don’t think that’s true.” 

Ben tilts his head toward her, drinking her in. Now that he’s up close he can see the freckles that are haphazardly sprinkled across her face, her slightly chapped lips, the purple bruises under her eyes that contrast brilliantly with the golden tan of her skin. Her eyebrows are quirked up in amusement but her hazel eyes are tired, hollow, devoid of any substantial emotion. 

“What do you mean?”

“You said-” he watches in fascination as the delicate skin around her neck shifts when she swallows, “-that you were only good at killing people.”

“Yep,” he smacks his lips obnoxiously popping his p. 

“And I don’t think that’s true. As I mentioned earlier, you’re pretty big.” Her lips quirk up. “I reckon you’d make a good redwood. Though that’s probably too big. But you’d be a good tree. Blend in with the rest of the trees in this park.”

Ben barks out a laugh at that. And another until it devolves into full-bodied laughter that comes from the pit of his stomach and rises through his mouth in uncontrollable bursts, tears streaming down his face, jaw aching, because when was the last time he laughed? 

Between bursts of laughter, he manages a, “Thanks, I’ll keep that in mind.” 

“You’re very welcome.” Her tone is amused and tinged with pride and Ben thinks that he maybe wants to make her laugh. And maybe be good at it. 

“I don’t,” he starts feeling strangely shy and hesitant. “I don’t want to kill you. I don’t really want to kill anyone, anymore. And I think I’m going to start my not-killing streak with you.” 

“Oh.” Rey sounds strangely disappointed, her voice quiet and when he looks over at her she averts her gaze from him immediately, instead fiddling with the holes at the cuffs of her sweater, picking the loose threads apart with extreme focus and precision. 

“Oh?” He tries to keep his voice casual so he doesn’t scare her but it comes out strangled, and concerned- far too concerned considering he was planning to kill her fifteen minutes ago. 

“Oh.” 

“Do you-” he pauses, trying to think of a delicate way of arranging and presenting his thoughts and coming up with none. “Do you want to die?” 

Rey lets out a shaky breath.

“Not really. I was just...okay with you killing me. It’s not like I want to die. I don’t smoke, I don’t drink excessively or do anything that necessarily shortens my life span. I do everything in my control to be alive. It’s a survival instinct that’s just ingrained within my bones. I grew up in a situation where there was no option but to survive. Whether I like it or not, my survival instinct is always on. But there’s just some kind of appeal about...it. I don’t want to die but I’m over life." Rey shrugs, the neck of her torn sweater shifting down her shoulder. "And while my survival instinct could fight you to an extent but you’d still kill me. A bus could run me over and my survival instinct probably couldn’t survive that. Those elements are out of my control. And just a taste of that was so….irresistible. So I guess, yeah I did want you to kill me. It doesn’t mean I want to die...I just wouldn’t mind it. I'm just so done and tired of surviving.”

Ben swallows heavily, trying to rid himself of the lump that formed in his throat as he listened to her. 

He doesn’t like talking about himself. It’s always felt like a burden, the voice of his mother berating him, ‘no Ben, not now- I’m busy’, so his lips always default into clamping together like a vice preventing any words that he so desperately wants to release from coming up.

But there’s something about her. 

And it’s not that he wants to tell her all his dirty little secrets, no he’s far too eager to impress her for that. 

But there’s something about that makes him want to claw open the stitches that hold him together and rip him apart until he is red, raw and open for her careful inspection. 

Because yes, he so desperately wants to impress her but for some unfathomable reason, he wants her to see the mess he is. He wants her to see him naked, torn to pieces, barely human but trying because there’s something about her that makes him want to tear himself to pieces and present them to her like an offering that only a cannibal could appreciate. He wants her to see the mess he is and like him despite it. 

And she’s been so open and vulnerable and raw that he thinks it’s an utmost necessity for her to know why he can’t kill her and why she can’t die. She's torn herself open for him and for equity's sake he thinks it's only fair that he does the same. 

So he starts talking. His voice is hoarse and he isn’t entirely sure if she can hear him or not but he continues to talk anyway, words spilling out from his mouth uncontrollably. 

“I...was sixteen when I first killed someone. I didn’t mean to. I really didn’t. I-” when he looks down at his hands, they’re shaking and he wonders how long they’ve been like that for. “It was an accident, I lost control and I was just _so_ angry. I felt so sick after and I never felt more alien from who I was. And my parents,” he lets out a small scoff. 

“We never had the best of relationships and it deteriorated after that. Which wasn’t a surprise because I did kill someone, but it still _hurt_. And I felt so alone...then this old guy… this old wrinkly fucker said that I did a really good job. And he was so sincere about it. He told me that, “what I did was wrong but I had talent.” And I thought that counted for something. And he did as well. Because he offered me these jobs and he’d pay me so much fucking money to kill these people. And I didn’t care about who I was killing or why, or even give a shit about the money. Because _he_ was so nice to me. He cared. He asked me how my day was, how I felt, offered me shelter, made jokes with me, my opinions always mattered and he always had time for me. But I was sixteen and I should’ve known better...but I didn’t I was just _so_ fucking dumb and all those things I thought he did were just inside my head. 

He didn’t fucking care, I didn’t matter to him. I was just a pawn who had the illusion of control. So after twelve years of thinking, he cared when all he did was tell me that I wasn’t enough, and twelve years of killing so many fucking people so I could feel like enough I killed him. And yeah, maybe that’s fucked but he deserved it.

But now that I’m without him, I don't know what is enough anymore. So I kept on killing people because I knew that at least I was good at that. And maybe that could be enough for me. But Rey-” her breath hitches at the mention of her name. “I don’t want to kill you. I mean, I don’t want to kill anybody really but I really, really don’t want to kill you. Because it’d be such a fucking shame for someone like you to die. I mean you’re unfortunately pretty, caustically funny and-” he cuts himself off, swallowing nervously. 

“I don’t want you to die. One man less, one world less. And I think your world is pretty interesting.” he finishes lamely.

He glances at her from the corner of his eye and a small smile curls at the corner of his lips when he sees that she is blushing.

“That’s-” she lets out a shaky breath. “Thank you.” She tilts her head to the side, teasing her bottom lip between her teeth. “ Y’know, I’m pretty good at _not_ killing people. Maybe I can help you with that?” 

Her voice is tense and high pitched, bubbling with anxiety and he wants nothing more than to ensure that she never needs to use that tone again and maybe he might get that chance to try because he’s pretty darn sure that she’s suggesting _seeing him again_. 

“Yes, yes,” he blurts out. “Yep, that sounds-. Yeah, that would be great.” 

Rey lets out a little giggle at his nervous ramble and he’s just so fucking relieved that she doesn’t sound so stressed anymore that he doesn’t even care that his ears are blushing red from embarrassment. It’s dark. She probably doesn’t notice.

“Your ears are cute,” she whispers.

_Shit_. She noticed.

Sensing his discomfort and insecurity (which probably wasn’t difficult, emotions always radiated off him notifying everyone in a ten-mile radius) Rey shuffles over to him and ever so gently presses her thigh against his. The lump that is almost always perpetually stuck in his throat is gone and it feels like he can breathe. After twenty-eight years of breathing through blocked lungs, he can finally breathe. 

She nudges his shoulder, and he turns to her, his gaze soft. She offers him a small, shy smile that makes him melt, his spinal cord no longer keeping his body upright.

They sit together, thigh to thigh their body temperature blending into one; a comforting warmth in the chill of the early morning. Time blurs into something immeasurable-seconds, minutes and hours suddenly meaningless- until it halts to a stop when Rey’s head drops heavily onto Ben’s shoulder. 

“Rey,” he nudges her with his shoulder. “Rey.” 

“Mmmph.” 

“Rey, are you just going to sleep out here?”

“Hrdjkfff.” 

“Rey, you can’t just sleep out here.” 

“Yes, I can.” 

“No, you can’t Rey-” he protests weakly but is cut off when her head moves from his shoulder to his lap, body stretching out and curling up on the cool park bench. 

“Rey, that can’t be comfortable.” 

“Sleep.” Her voice is muffled into the inside of his thigh and his back stiffens slightly at the sensation. 

Ben lets out a heavy sigh, looking up to the sky as if the light-polluted city sky will give him all the answers to questions that he doesn’t know he has. He shrugs off his hoodie, gently draping it across Rey’s body. 

“Thanks,” her voice is muffled against the material of his trousers. “That’s really warm.” With every exhale, a warm puff of air brushes against his trousers and he doesn’t know why it’s so soothing, or why the weight of her head on his lap feels so good but he thinks that maybe he’s okay with not knowing. 

Ben falls asleep.

When he wakes up, the sun is shining bright and the insides of his eyes are lit pink as the sun hits his face. Slowly with his hand shielding his eyes from the sun, he squints them open blinking the sleep away. His body ached, his back cramped and begging to be relieved from the sleep-ridden tension. 

When he looks down at his lap he realizes that there is a human missing from it. And his hoodie that was draped over Rey is missing with it. The calligraphy pen that was in his hoodie pocket is balanced precariously on his knee, and on his wrist written in ink-blurred letters, he reads ‘Takadona cafe’. 

He looks up to the sky and as the sun blinds his eyes, for the first time in what feels like an eternity, he smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading :)) i hope you enjoyed
> 
> also, if you want to say hi on [ twitter ](https://twitter.com/wouldiwereshoo1)
> 
> fic title is taken from a line in Richard Silken's little beast (which is featured in murakamism's amazing 'the brightest hour')


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